The Power and the Money

Attack of the drones, updated

 New information emerged fast regarding that drone attack in Syria. From the Washington Post:

1. Nobody seems to know who was responsible. Yesterday we noted that the Islamic State controlled no more territory; experts suspect a different rebel group was responsible;
2. The Russians claim the attack involved 13 drones, 7 shot down and 6 disrupted by electronic countermeasures;
3. The drones appear to have traveled at least 50 kilometers.

In terms of the Syrian Civil War, this is a nothingburger. It does not represent a rebel resurgence. Nor is does it mean anything for the Russian presence, which was already being drawn down in the wake of Putin’s declaration of victory.

But in terms of the future of war, it’s a harbinger. I want to know more about those electronic countermeasures.

Attack of the drones

 One day we have to continue our fisking of Ghost Fleet. I don’t like panning anything, but the book was full of howlers. Fine for fiction, but it was dispiriting to see so many people take it so seriously.

But one thing the book got right was the use of drones in future conflict, including a good scene during the Chinese invasion of Hawaii (page 69).

It now seems that life is catching up with fiction, right on schedule.

The Islamic State used drones regularly as weapons. Sometimes they placed bombs on the drones themselves; other times they would drop mortar shells from the UAVs. Now, however, the remnants of the Islamic State appear to have upped their game and attacked Russian forces en masse. They claim to have destroyed an S-400 missile launcher.

Unsurprisingly, the Russians claim something rather different.

A more neutral take supports the Russian claim that their Pantsir S-2 anti-aircraft cannon was successful in shredding the attack by a small fleet of commercial quadcopters.

All this said, the Islamic State no longer controls meaningful territory and couldn’t be expected to mount much of an attack. But what happens as the drones get better? Like, say, by mounting a small kerosene jet engine on ‘em? Or, more frighteningly, by going the other way and making ‘em smaller and smaller and ever harder to detect?

I’m relatively sanguine about this development. It won’t bring down civilization. But it may revolutionize ground combat. I’m not sure what the defenses against slaughterbots will look like, but I am sure that we’re going to see some dramatic changes in military tactics over the next decade.

Thoughts?

The future is not all bad

My reaction to most new technological developments at the level of personal tech usually falls into one of two categories. (1) “Who gives a fuck?” Fitbit, any new phones since 2007, Google Glass. (2) “This is going to make life worse.” Intelligent personal assistants (Alexa, Siri, et al), autonomous flying drones, ever-smaller cameras, virtual reality, whatever succeeds Google Glass. (Self-driving cars are in an intermediate category if they really bring down accidents.) 

In general, I am not a terribly big fan of the future I find myself in. I like TiVo, cellphones were nifty, search engines are an excellent thing and I wish that more books and datasets were digitized. Beyond that, I am neutral ... at best. Even blogging, hey, it wastes some time, but there is a reason I went off social media as soon as I got on it.

So ... I am happy to discover a list of new inventions that I really can get behind! Now, not all. The Naked 3D fitness tracker is creepy. Ori Systems robotic furniture seems useless. Awair smart air-quality monitor, pretty much ditto. And I cannot really see myself buying an OURA ring.

But the rest? Awesome! A future I can get behind.

Plus, my kids and I watched a spaceship take off from our attic window last night.

Feeling a little better about the Singularity

 Let us just say that Watson did not cover itself with glory when it used its market analysis software to make conclusions about the presidential candidates based on their writings. 

But get back to me in 2040. That is more-or-less my breathe-easy date: if computers and robots aren’t in the process of rapidly wrecking our social systems by then, then we will probably make it to the 22nd Century okay. 

Moore’s Law has been repealed

 This blog has evinced some concern about the social effects of rapid progress in information technology, especially as computers using massive statistical techniques appear capable of doing more and more jobs that used to be the domain of humans.

The bad news for the Luddites among us (I probably should count myself as one) is that the hardware ship has already sailed. Even if there are no more advances in computer hardware for the next fifty years, our software still has not caught up. There is a lot of disruption coming down the pike. 

The good news is that Moore’s Law may be dead. In 2012, I wrote that it might have a decade left. But now Intel has announced that not only will chips stop getting faster ... they will start to slow down as engineers try to focus on ways to cut energy use. 

More energy-efficient computers promise a host of changes, some good and some not, but they are unlikely to wake up one morning and decide to stuff us all into tubes.

Crazy thoughts: Robopocalypse soon

 As I get older, there have been a lot of things which have been weighing on my mind. But the future has always weighed on my mind. This has been the case at least since I was 10 and we moved to Los Alamos. In fact, it goes back even further, since I was always thinking about what I wanted to be when I grew up: the first time I remember answering that question was when I was 4 on the way back from the beach in Santa Barbara. I wasn’t even asked. I just spontaneously told my parents in the car I wanted to be a doctor. That rapidly switched to paleontologist until I was 10 and my aunt gave me a book on Lucy by Dr White. I didn’t turn out to be a paleontologist at all, but my passion for Deep Time, human origins and all things paleo didn’t fade. But not coincidentally, my interest in the future blossomed at the same time I began to dig into the origins of humanity.

Recently I have been considering the future but in very specific ways. The first is through my involvement in the aerospace industry, GLXP and NASA. This is what my co-blogger calls my attempts to build “yesterday’s tomorrow.” However, I have also been considering the coming to today’s tomorrow: the coming impact of robotics and information technology on the economy. I have been calling it the “Robopocalypse.”

Why did I pick such a hyperbolic name? Well, I was ribbing Noel over his concerns about the future. He is deeply worried the economy and automata. I can attest that I first heard him voice concerns about this back in the antediluvian days of 2006. (Or was it earlier?) I should add that he is not alone.

I thought it was silly. Even if half the current jobs disappeared, it would not happen overnight. Consider: at late as 1940, agriculture employed 19% of the labor force. It took thirty years to push that down to 4.6%. Those were thirty pretty good years, for most people. (It’s now 1.8%.)

However, as I have read and considered more, I do think there will be problems. With a few exceptions, agricultural workers were pulled out by urban opportunities at least as much as they were pushed out by technological advances. The problems we face over 2010-40 will be different and it will take a rather different approach to address them.

Let’s set out the worries.

The Jobs at Risk 

This will not be a comprehensive list, but it touch on some obvious problems. We’ll limit it to seven categories.

1. Driving.

This includes taxis, truckers and the like. There are 223,000 taxi drivers and chauffeurs in the United States. There are 1,273,000+ delivery drivers in the U.S. There are 653,300 bus drivers in the U.S. There are 1,700,000+ truckers in the U.S. You are looking at around 4 million people. With the coming of self driving cars, these jobs are all likely to go away.

2. Fast Food

There are 4,438,000+ people working as waiters and servers. 2,148,000 worked as cooks. Of those 4.5 million (+/-) 3.6 million were working in the fast food industry. With the advent of the burgertron and the like, the fast food portion of these jobs is likely to go away.

3. Janitorial

There are 2,324,000 people working as janitors. There are 1,434,000 people working in house cleaning. The bots are coming for their 3.7 million jobs, too. 

4. Construction

Construction equipment operators total around 409,700. There are 902,000 carpenters. There are 229,000 masons (brick and concrete). There are 1,284,000 construction laborers. Plus another associated ~600,000 others (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). You’re looking at around 3.5 million jobs — and a lot of them can be automated. 

5. Manufacturing

Assembly line workers are about 1,755,000 strong. Machine operators are about 1,013,000. Painting and coating? 149,000. Welders? 357,000. Machinists? 476,000. That’s another 3.75 million jobs.

6. Cashiers

There are 3,338,000 cashiers in the country. Imagine a future where everything in the store has a RFID chip and you get instantaneously charged as you walk out the door. Imagine how National Car Rental today touts it as a benefit that you can rent one of their cars without talking to a person. Imagine the last time you had a pleasant exchange at the 7-11 or Target. Exactly.

7. “Movers” (longshoremen, warehouse workers, etc)

There are 3,428,000 of them.

There you have 25.31 million plus jobs which are in danger and probably will be replacing in the next two decades at the latest. The labor force in the Unit ed States is 156.4 million!

You’re looking at an implosion of at least 1/6th of all jobs in the United States just from those categories. There will likely be more.  This is doubly the case since Watson and its buddies (machine learning based software bots) have implications for skilled white collar workers. Especially vulnerable are the assistants and secretaries, as the technology behind Siri and Cortana improves.

You are looking at a potential unemployment not seen since at least the Great Depression assuming these people cannot be trained for other jobs. The crux of the problem is that the jobs they could easily be trained for are, well, gone. Other job categories may expand … but at evenr lower wages.

This is why Noel et al are very nervous about the Robopocalypse. He is concerned about the fact that capital would supplant labor: you can buy a machine with money and it’ll keep working until it breaks, which case you can get another one. That requires a lot of money and what we call the middle class even if we have jobs will not be able to afford it. Never mind the lower or working classes. This would leave us in a virtual state of feudalism. Those with money keep it and get more. Those without ... well. sucks to be us. If this logic is correct, then the best case is that the demand for personal service skyrockets … bringing us back to Downton Abbey but with universal surveillance and weirder clothes.

In fact, if you think of computer programs as a form of capital, then the problem could be even worse. There is a new paper (that I think is wrong, but that will have to wait) that lays out the following logic: once code is written, it doesn’t depreciate. That task is done — it will keep working forever. Great for the person who owns the code; not so good for the people who wrote it. In that world, mandating open-source won’t help. Open-source will keep the owners from gobbling up all the rents but won’t do anything to prevent the wages of coders from crashing.

We can’t let this come about, can we? We certainly can’t let millions starve! And we definitely cannot let a return of feudalism, even techno feudalism, take place.

So, what to do?

There are multiple solutions. They range from the ludditical to utopian (for the silly responses) to even inspired by Milton Friedman of all people (for at least one of the smart ones).

That will be covered in the next Crazy Thoughts Post. But what do you think? Is this a problem for the 2020s? A problem for 2040? Or a problem for never?

Robopocalypse now

 Paul Waldman appears to be a man after my own heart.

Your questions about space and the Singularity: Answered!

 Our new guest blogger, Will Baird, has a Reddit thread! I like Reddit. It reminds me of the good old days on Usenet, before all this weird-ass “social media” crap came around to destroy human life.

But this post is not to tell you to stay off my lawn. (Right now, with two young kids, I am very happy for neighborhood children to come over and play on our lawn uninvited.) This post is to tell you all to go read the thread! Even if Will isn’t currently still active on it, it’s fascinating. Go, read. 

3-D printed houses are not ready for prime time

 Courtesy of Will Baird, I learn that a company in China is breathlessly promoting its 3-D printed houses. A revolution! The future is here! Not robots, but the next best thing.

Or not. There are some numbers in the second link. At first you’ll see a claim of $4,800 for a 2,100 square foot house. That is ... hard to believe. It is also contradicted later on in the same article, where they claim a total construction cost of $161,000. So the $4,800 is probably the cost of the printed construction materials.

$4,800 is not a dramatic decrease in materials cost. In South Florida, your typical concrete construction costs about $6 per square foot of living space. (That is not the cost of the poured concrete; it’s the cost of the concrete needed for the walls in a house of that size.) That comes to about $12,000 in total. Now, $4,800 is less than $12,000, but it isn’t clear how much of that reduction is due to the technology and how much is due to other things. Consider that in California, concrete walls cost about $11 per square foot of interior space: almost twice their Floridian cost! Building codes matter a lot. I suspect that a Miami builder could halve their costs if they built to Shanghai standards.

The article reports a “total cost” of $161,000 further down, which is a far-from-revolutionary $74 per square foot. And it isn’t clear if that’s the total construction cost or just the cost of the printing materials when you make the correct all-in calculation, although given cheap labor in China I would guess the former.

I think this is either a publicity stunt or a marginal improvement. Maybe both.

The Second Korean War of 2019

First, read this scenario.

Second, questions. Is the timeframe and the tactics realistic? I have a few doubts about the robot rats, mostly due to the problems of the power systems and the fact that explosives are not as powerful as the scenario presupposes.

Also: if the laws that this paper predicts come to pass, I will engage in nonviolent disobedience by taking a baseball bat to your fuzzy dogbot.

When I get depressed about the future, it universally involves ...

... thinking about artificial intelligence. Climate change, social change, technological change in everything else (including having teenage semi-whizzes be able to program recombinant DNA) is stuff we can handle. It is stuff we have seen. It poses problems that we can fix without winding up eating Soylent Green.

But artificial intelligence? Damn. Weak AI wrecks the labor market and catapults us into an era of income inequality unseen since the industrial revolution, with no easy way out. Strong AI wrecks what it means to be human, unless we all merge with it, in which case ... it wrecks what it means to be human, albeit with a chance at it turning out better, maybe kinda.

Prompt for musing can be found here, where the American Prospect interviews James Barrat, author of Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era. Read it and hope that Koomey’s Law runs out of steam real soon. Or that Charlie Stross is correct, and the only way to get an intelligent robot is to grow and raise it.

The future is here?

Well, sort of. In 1964, Isaac Asimov in speculated about the World’s Fair of 2014. How did he do?

Well, we didn’t have a nuclear war. Check.

We have not landed people on Mars. Check.

“Robots [are] neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they [are] in existence” and driverless cars are beginning to be feasible. Check.

Communications are dirt cheap and “the screen can be used not only to see the people you call but also for studying documents and photographs and reading passages from books. Synchronous satellites, hovering in space will make it possible for you to direct-dial any spot on earth.” Check.

No mention of wireless phones, but that was already a trope of near-future science fiction. Heinlein had a thing for startling his mid-century readers by having characters pick up their phone in the middle of the desert or use “I left my phone in my other coat” as an excuse for not being in contact. It probably just did not occur to Asimov to add ubiquitous mobile. The essay did not include the myriad knock-on effects of cheap computers and the Internet, but it predicted them. So, with a caveat, check.

Wall screens will have replaced cathode-ray tubes for television. Check.

Large-scale solar-power. Check. (He also says fusion plants, but he says they will only be experimental. I guess you could claim that we have one of those already. Check.)

He worries about technological unemployment caused by automation, which is not here yet ... but we may be seeing it cause drops in wages. Give him points. ¾ check.

The rest, though? Ugh. First, he extrapolates his own odd agoraphobia onto the population. Yes, we could be building underground cities in 2014, but with the partial exception of Singapore (which is in sort of a unique position) we ain’t. People like, you know, sunlight and views. Plus it is expensive. Maybe ¼ check, and that only because of the plans in Singapore. ¾ fail.

His kitchen of the future could be built, but mostly has not. People like to cook. And it is easy enough to pop a prepared mean in the microwave; why fancy it up with a conveyor from the fridge? Fail.

He predicted that robots would still be bad, but they are even worse than he predicted. If you think we will have robot maids and gardeners by 2024, then I will give it to him on credit. Otherwise, fail. (Will? Carlos? Anyone else?)

Commonplace radioisotope batteries. Nuclear fission providing half of all electricity. (Asimov saw the future and it turned out to be Belgium!) Moving sidewalks in urban downtowns. No on-street parking in central cities. Compressed air tubes carrying intra-city cargoes. And moon colonies, of course. Fail, fail, fail, fail and fail.

Plus, 3-D holographic cubes and all high-schoolers learning to code. Fail, although itis probably our own failing that we do not teach all high-schoolers to code.

Alright then. He got the big stuff, but missed the implications, and added on a bunch of other big stuff that did not happen. (Most of which show little sign of happening.)

So what’s the right grade?

And will we still have World’s Fairs in 2064?

Robocapalyse maybe

Computers have made some startling advances lately in things like voice and object recognition. Put it together, and we are beginning to see some signs that our glorified typewriters-cun-filing cabinets are turning into the robots and computers of classical science fiction. Which brings us to the obvious question: what will they do to the labor market?

A recent paper tries to answer a more limited question: what percentage of jobs are susceptible to computerization? If that number is small, then there is nothing to worry about. If that number is large, then we have to hope that new human-only jobs will emerge that most humans can do ... or watch income inequality expand to unseen levels.

To make this analysis useful, you need to do three things. First, you need to estimate the limit capability of computers. That is, what will they be able to do once Moore’s Law comes to an end. (For the nerds: Koomey’s Law is just as important in this context. After all, a robot that consumed $500 per hour worth of electricity would not be very valuable.)

Second, you need to identify the current jobs that these hypothetical future computers will be able to replace.

Third, you need a methodology that provides you with an upper bound. Why an upper bound? Because the second thing above pushes your estimates upwards. After all, jobs change ... but any reasonable identification strategy will have to identify computer-susceptible jobs as they are and not as they could be. That already implies significant upwards bias, so in order to get a useful estimate one should run with it. That won’t help much if the percentage of computerizable jobs that you come up with is 98%, but it will help if it is, say, 60% or 40% or 25% ... it will provide a useful ceiling.

OK, so how does the paper stack up?

In terms of the raw theory, not too bad. They take a well-worn Cobb-Douglas production functionand replace labor with three labor inputs: perception and manipulation tasks, creative intelligence tasks, and social intelligence tasks.

In terms of its time horizon, it goes out about two decades, to 2035. “The main challenges to robotic computerisation, perception and manipulation, thus largely remain and are unlikely to be fully resolved in the next decade or two.” (Page 25.) This makes me vaguely unhappy: the big challenges are what happens after that, at the limit. After all, my boy will be my age in 2055 ... and if I live as long as my father did, I will also still be around.

If terms of data ... ugh. They used BLS data to group 702 jobs in terms of the three labor inputs. They then validated that model by using the BLS data to ... predict their subjective evaluations.

The results is that restaurant cooks and models wind up in the same easily-computerizable category as radio operators and cashiers. Down on the hard-to-computerize side, we have logisticians ranked with the guys who work in boiler rooms. (The latter is probably not what you think.) Both are hard to computerize ... but the latter is much harder. (I should add that I have worked in both fields, albeit very briefly and in one courtesy of the Army.)

Is there a non-intuitive way to test the plausibility of the rankings? Carlos Yu and I think we might have one. The less-computerizable jobs should also be the jobs where employees have more leverage over employers. Technically, you could use the the negative log of computerizability as a measure of bargaining power regarding future earnings. In Carlos’ words: “That works fine for data entry and telemarketers, who have -log(.99) ~ zero bargaining power, but given the weight of teaching, counseling, and nursing professions on the low-computerizability end of the scale, it suggests other factors are in play.”

In short, an intriguing paper, with what looks like the right methodology ... but not one that gives a useful roadmap to 2035, let along 2055 or 2100.

The robots are here

I have been beating the robot drum since around 2006, as Will Baird and Carlos Yu will attest. In fact, I have been worrying about it for a long time, ever since I asked myself, riding a number 6 train back in the 1980s, “Why do we need people running this thing at all?” A decade later, in the 1990s, I had an impassioned discussion with my (Texan) then-girlfriend about the terrible effect automated taxis would have on the Mexican middle class. I stopped reading most science fiction (Charlie Stross excepted, and I am wondering if this Blue Remembered Earth is worth it) because too much either bounced between “Singularity! Wild wow whoo-hoo! The humans are dead!” and completely ignoring the effect of automation. There was this science-fiction noir series set in San Francisco that dealt with some of the issues (I cannot remember the name, dammit!) but even it had a scene with a human truck driver that just did not make any sense.

All this is a lead-in to getting you to click this link. It is a conversation between two Navy pilots upon watching an unmanned X-47B perform touch-and-go landings on an aircraft carrier. It is awesome. Read!

The end of progress? Probably not.

Robert Gordon just published a paper that is very pessimistic about long-term economic growth. It essentially argues that the big wave of innovation from IT is over. Infotech may radically reorder our lives in the coming decades, but it won’t allow us to make more stuff. Moreover, the big important inventions have been made. His example: would you rather give up all the electronic and IT stuff invented after 1975, or keep all that but have to abandon indoor plumbing?

As a metaphor for the state of play, that nails it. If it doesn’t for you, that is because you have never had to live without indoor plumbing. At night. In the rain.

There are three ripostes to this thesis. The first is that Moore’s Law ain’t over yet. (More to the point, Koomey’s Law ain’t over yet: it states that the energy efficiency of computers doubles every 18 months.) If Moore and Koomey hold for another decade or two, then there is the possibility that AI will emerge seemingly out of nowhere, sometime in the 2030s. Economic growth will surge, but prepare yourself for the robot riots. (I will be joining the rioters, and training my young son to lead them.)

There are reasons to think this will not happen, possibly ever. (I can hope!)

The second riposte, then, is that even without singularian magic, better computers will improve productivity the old-fashioned way. Consider construction robots. My co-blogger and I went back-and-forth on this with our friends Will Baird and Carlos Yu. We concluded that construction is a super-conservative fragmented industry, so there will be no revolution (or robot riots) ... but there will be a slow trickle out of construction (and vehicle operation) just as there was out of agricultural labor, elevator operation, and telegraph delivery. That could keep growth going for a while yet. (Matt Yglesias points out some other sectors ripe for growth here.)

But there is an even more convincing riposte than the above two. It comes from Carlos Yu, and it is based on work by Alexander Field, an economic historian who has pointed out that the Depression-wracked 1930s were likely the most technologically-productive decade of the past century.

What then is the third riposte?

SHORT VERSION: Stop focusing on the damn computers!

LONGER VERSION: “After reading Alexander Field’s book, I distrust the simple correlation in timing between technological improvements and productivity growth. In any case, Gordon is over-focused on the immediate implications of information technology, and he’s missed the one under his nose: biotechnology.

“The Green Revolution doesn’t show up much in American productivity statistics, since our crops had already been improved through a hundred-plus years of scientific selective breeding, but it does show up in global productivity. (Though biotechnology is probably keeping our crop yields high in the biological arms race against disease and pests, but that’s hard to quantify with typical productivity measurements.)

“Cheap effective medicines is another. For many health issues, we can actually buy a few more years of life — or more than a few — at prices far below the break-even point. If we take his question about toilets versus computers and switch it to toilets versus postwar improvements in the applied biological sciences, I think we’d be carrying our chamberpots to the outhouse.

“And now we’re entering the second wave of improvements in biotechnology, ones based on the information technology revolution. It might be a dud. I strongly suspect not.”

Ray Kurzweil never went to business school

I gotta be honest: this makes the future less scary.

God bless the lawyers.